Here are some of the highlights for 2011

• Year over year revenue grew 39%
• Year over year profit grew 44%
• Except for just 2 months out of the year, our store had higher revenues than the previous year’s highest month.
• Our SG&A went down as a percentage of revenue due to the fact that we had no major travel expenses.
• Our average order size remained relatively flat but the pure number of orders per day went way up
• Our margins increased significantly due to the introduction of higher end products
• Website traffic increased by about 31%

As you can see from the numbers above, we had another killer year with over 44% growth! If you look at all of the years that we’ve been in existence, that is now 3 straight years of at least double digit increases!

To put things in perspective, if my wife had stuck with her six figure day job, she probably wouldn’t be receiving double digit raises every year. In fact, I can’t even remember the last time I got a double digit raise at my current job! It really pays to have your own business on the side and the internet allows you to that with very little upfront risk.

Other Highlights

In addition to a pretty healthy uptake in business, we were also featured in a few major publications and our handkerchiefs were even used in a celebrity wedding though I don’t have permission to publish the name.

• Our personalized handkerchiefs were featured in the annual Martha Stewart Weddings DIY Issue
• Our tea napkins were featured in the Jan/Feb issue of Lonny Magazine
• Our cocktail napkins made the “Homes” section of the Wall Street Journal in the Dec 10th, 2011 issue!

Breaking Down The Numbers And What We Did Differently This Year

The bottom line is that more traffic equals more sales. The reason our revenues increased as much as they did was because our traffic increased by a proportional amount. And these increases were a direct result of our search engine optimization efforts, our increased advertising spend and word of mouth.

Last year, we already ranked in the top 4 spots for our targeted keywords phrases. So this year, instead of trying to get all of those keywords to the #1 spots, I started focusing on long tail keywords that were just shy of the front page. It turns out that our online store ranked for a whole bunch of keywords that were in the top 20 and required just a little push to make the front. These extra long tail keywords contributed to much of the traffic gains for the store.

In addition, the direct traffic to our store increased by 39% as word of mouth continued to spread. Seriously, we’ve been recommended by many of our existing customers as evidenced by some of the phone calls and emails we’ve received.

We Revisited Our Adwords Campaigns

The bad thing about running an Adwords account is that campaigns can quickly go stale. Since I had a lot going on in previous years, I’d been neglecting our Adwords account and many of our campaigns got out of whack. So in the first quarter of last year, I did a major overhaul of all of our advertising campaigns and got back on track.

For keywords that performed well, I maxed out our bids to the point where we were getting the most clicks possible while still making a profit. For keywords that weren’t converting well, I made the keyword phrases more specific to improve the conversion rate.

We Introduced More Product Lines

As I had mentioned in a previous post, the textile industry in China is in major flux. Fabric prices have been shooting through the roof due to increased labor costs and labor shortages so we’ve had to adjust by continually finding new backup vendors to add to the mix. Thankfully, last year things settled down a bit and my wife was able to introduce a few new products lines to our store.

We now carry products that span across the entire gamut of price points. In other words, we now carry lower end products, middle range goods and a new high end line of hankies that are imported from Germany. By increasing our high end product lines, we’ve managed to increase margins which have added to the amount of profit per conversion.

Lowlights For 2011 And What’s Ahead

Despite all of the great profit growth, unfortunately there were some lowlights for the store as well. For example, both the average number of pages per visit and the average time on site went down about 7% compared to the prior year.

Based on my last article about why my online store needs a mobile website and how to tell if you need one too, I attribute this reduction in time on site to the increased number of cell phone users that have shopped at our store and the lack of optimization for these customers on our part.

There’s no doubt about it. The number of mobile customers is going to explode this coming year and I’m currently in the process of taking appropriate action. In fact, I’ve been working on the mobile site for my online store for the past 2 weekends and it’s almost ready for prime time.

As I mentioned in a previous post, most of my competitors don’t have a mobile site up yet so I’m hoping that having one will allow me to steal some business away from them. If you are curious about creating a mobile site of your own, I’ve documented everything that I had to go through in creating mine and I’ll be sure to have a series of blog posts about it.

There are many different approaches to making a site mobile and I evaluated each option thoroughly before deciding to completely gut my site and custom code most of the pages from scratch. In any case, I’ll keep you all posted once the mobile site goes live so you can check it out. Here’s to a successful 2012!

The Best Blog Posts Of 2011

Let’s face it. We are all very busy with our lives so I know that most of you don’t have the time to read every single post on this blog. So, I thought that I’d take some time and highlight some of the best articles of 2011. Enjoy!

Fun Articles

• How To Improve Your Online Store Website By Negotiating With Your Toddler
• How To Increase Sales For Your Small Business By Potty Training Your Child

Entrepreneurship

• From 0 To Quit: Why You Should Start An Online Store Today And Why Niche Shops Are So Powerful
• Why Embracing The Turtle Will Help Your Online Business Succeed
• Why Etsy Stores Are At A Disadvantage Compared To Online Stores That Own Their Domain
• The Secrets To Being Successful With Any Business You Launch
• Niche Affiliate Site Or Online Store | Which Should I Launch If I Want To Quit My Job?
• Dropshipping Vs Affiliate Marketing: Which Online Business Will Make You More Money?

Ecommerce Related

• How We Use Google Analytics To Improve Our Online Store
• How To Install An Open Source Shopping Cart And Start Your Online Store In Under 5 Minutes
• Why Ranking High In Organic Search Doesn’t Cut It Anymore When It Comes To Online Stores
• How To Get More Facebook Fans With A Facebook Reveal Tab Or Fan Gate
• 3 Usability Issues With Our Online Store Website That Were Uncovered By A Clueless Customer
• Are These Ecommerce Mistakes Driving Newbie Shoppers Away From Your Online Store?
• Ecommerce Mistakes That Make You Look Like An Amateur

Thanks again and here’s to an even more successful 2012!
Take Care,
Steve

Getting Punished For Being Honest

Here’s just a sampling of what I had to go through in order to install one piece of software that we use everyday for our business. Without this software, we can not sell personalized items in our store. So get this. Even though I completely reinstalled the program using my original and authentic installation disk, the software would not run because I needed to reactivate it!

With programs like Microsoft Windows, reactivation can be done completely online. However, this company required me to contact them directly to get a new activation code. Not only was this a major hassle but I also had to wait until Monday morning before I could contact support which meant that the weekend’s orders could not be processed.

So finally Monday rolls around, I get a hold of support and they inform me that my software was registered using a different address, email address and phone number than before and that they couldn’t reactivate my software unless I used the original information. But the kicker was that they also couldn’t tell me what info I had used in the past.

After arguing with the sales rep for about 20 minutes, she finally relented and gave me a new activation code. But the damage was already done. This ordeal wasted several days of my valuable time and caused numerous delays with our order fulfillment. The worst part? I paid good money for this software, so why was I getting punished and hassled just because someone else decided to copy it illegally?

More Ridiculous Copy Protection Shenanigans

Getting a new computer also meant that I was forced to upgrade my operating system to Windows 7 from Windows XP. And it just so happens that one of my software CDs only has the XP version which won’t run on Windows 7. So I contact support and they provide me with a download link to the Windows 7 version of the program. Cool! Everything is all good until I try and run the software.

The program requires the CD to be in the actual CD drive in order to run!!! Since I didn’t have the Windows 7 version of the CD, I had to contact support and have them send me another one. Another week lost and once again I was getting punished for paying for my software!

More Chaos And A Lesson Learned

In the midst of all the chaos, we also had to deal with one very annoying customer issue. The other day we received a surprise return in our mailbox. But it was not just any ordinary return. This particular lady had the gall to ask for a refund for goods that she had already used. Actually, the word “used” is a mild way of putting it. To be specific, she purchased a set of napkins and returned them to us completely filthy and then demanded a refund.

When we told her that we didn’t accept returns that are not in resell-able condition (not to mention nasty used napkins), she claimed that the napkins were this dirty when she received them. Yeah right…

Your return policy says 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed. I’m not satisfied.

Since it wasn’t worth having her throw a fit and getting all upset over 35 bucks, we begrudgingly gave her a refund.

The funny thing though is that this one isolated incident made my wife and I completely reevaluate our return policy. Currently, we offer a 30 day money back guarantee but this lady pissed us off so much that we seriously considered making all sales final. No returns period.

But once we calmed down, we thought about our ordeal with the sewing software companies and realized that we were probably feeling exactly how they felt whenever someone copied their software. And here we were considering some drastic anti-return measures to prevent future customers from cheating us out of money.

After a while, we realized that canceling our return policy just because of this one crazy lady was ridiculous. But man was it tempting. As a business owner and a human being, it’s really easy to overreact especially when you feel completely ripped off and taken advantage of. But it’s important not to lose sight of the big picture and focus on your main customer base, the customers that you care about.

Is your business making important decisions based on a few vocal customers? Are you making your business worse for the majority of customers because of a few bad seeds that are abusing the system?

Now I don’t want to discount the importance of protecting your business profits, but I just hate it when a small group of people spoil things for the rest of us. Let’s try to not to let that happen with our small businesses shall we?

Oh Tortoise, Oh Wise One

But something interesting happened to me during my late twenties after I got married. I started having less and less time to myself and I was forced to set a schedule in order to find free time for my side projects. When my wife gave birth to our first child, I had even less time and on top of everything else, I was sleep deprived as well.

But strangely enough, the busiest periods of my life coincided with some of my biggest accomplishments. The reason? The tortoise like mindset. Since I had much smaller blocks of time to work on stuff, I had to tackle every project piece by piece on a set schedule. Instead of working 20 hours over a weekend and burning myself out, I simply picked a pace that I could sustain indefinitely and all of sudden things started to click.

Working on my side projects became part of my lifestyle and I rarely felt pressured or frustrated due to a lack of time. For example, Sunday nights became my blog posting night. Sunday mornings before the kids got up became my online store improvement time. On Thursday nights, I would work on my online store course.

Tortoise Like Results

Most people who adopt the “hare” like mindset often make significant progress in a short period of time but then burn out and stop working altogether. The beauty of the tortoise is that even though you might not be fast, you are always making constant progress towards your goals. And if you manage to integrate your business related tasks into a consistent weekly schedule, you’ll be surprised at how much you can accomplish in a short period of time.

When my wife and I first started our wedding handkerchief shop, we devoted every Sunday to the business. In fact, it was penciled into our calendar as part of a lifestyle change that we both agreed upon until the store was up and running. We purposely did not schedule anything on that day and we worked on our store consistently every week. As a result, it took a little longer for us to launch but our store made huge strides every week. Today, we still maintain a set schedule where we add new content to keep our website fresh.

MyWifeQuitHerJob.com is also a great example of the “tortoise” mindset at its best. For the past 3 years, I’ve written at least one blog post per week and to tell you the truth, I don’t even think about it anymore. It’s subconscious. Writing blog posts has become a part of my lifestyle. It is ingrained into my schedule and if I don’t write, I get this nagging feeling of regret.

Even though the blog started out “extremely” slow (Things didn’t pick up until after well over a year), today this website attracts over 38K visitors a month and my email newsletter grows by 20-40 people every single day. In the back of my mind, I always knew that my blog would make it to this point but I had no clue how long it would take and I didn’t really care. I simply picked a sustainable pace and made blogging a part of my life.

Finally, my most recent “tortoise” like accomplishment has been with my Create A Profitable Online Store course. When I launched on March 2nd, I had no video content whatsoever. The first 25 students that signed up did so based on good faith that I was going to pump out some great video tutorials…and I delivered on a consistent weekly basis.

Today, there are over 60+ videos in my course library representing well over 30 hours of material on how to run a successful online store. Because preparing the material and shooting the footage takes me about 10 minutes for every minute of video produced, this means I’ve spent over 300 hours on my course in the past 7 months. Could I have done this in one straight 13 day span? No way! I can barely find a nice 2 hour block of time with 2 kids!

The Moral Of The Story

So what am I trying to say here? When it comes to starting a business, it’s not a sprint. If you try and cram everything in a mad rush to launch, you will burnout…guaranteed. Instead of being in such a hurry, simply pick a pace that you can maintain indefinitely and focus on the long term for a period of at least a year or more.

Being the tortoise is not glamorous by any means. You won’t be able to brag how you made X dollars in just a 2 weeks. You won’t be able to say that you started a full blown business in under a month. But you will make steady progress long after those rabbits have quit and moved on to something else.

Make Sure You Set Up Ecommerce Tracking

Google Analytics has many ecommerce specific features which are not setup by default with the standard javascript snippet. While many shopping cart packages support Google Analytics ecommerce tracking out of the box, you sometimes have to enable this feature in the admin panel of your shopping cart because it involves sending Google all of your conversion rate information. And by all your information, I really mean ALL which is why some people get a little apprehensive about giving all of this data to the big G.

For example, once you have the full blown ecommerce tracking set up, Google will know exactly which products you sell, how much you are making as well as how much you charge for shipping. However, while you are sending Google a lot of private information, they will never access your records without your permission and the tracking that comes along with it is invaluable. Trust me.

In any case, once you have ecommerce tracking set up is when the fun begins. Here are a few things that Google Analytics will help you track.

• The total amount of revenue broken down by products sold and correlated with every traffic source that you receive
• Your conversion rate depending on the traffic source. Do certain mediums convert better than others?
• The demographic data of your customers. Is someone in New York more likely to spend more than someone from Wyoming? Is someone from Georgia more likely to buy a certain item from your shop?

As you can see, ecommerce tracking in Google Analytics essentially allows you to gather and cross reference many key pieces of data for your online store. Very valuable stuff.

Refining Our Google Adwords Ads And Our Product Mix

So what are some of the primary ways we use Google Analytics? Probably one of the most important uses of Google Analytics is to refine our Google Adwords ads. By tracking all of the search queries that customers type in when searching and clicking on our Adwords ads, we know exactly what the customer is looking for and we can adjust both our ad keywords and our landing pages accordingly.

For example, if a customer arrives at our website looking for something that we do not carry, we can add negative keywords to our Adwords campaigns. Negative keywords prevent Adwords ads from showing up when a customer types in a query that contains a specific keyword. As a result, we save money with our ad spend because we will never pay for ads for customers that don’t stand a chance of buying from us.

Another way we use Google Analytics is to decide on what new products to add to our online store. For example, if we look at our reports and find that a disproportionate number of people are searching for “European Handkerchiefs”, we may decide to carry them in our store. In fact, we added European imported lace handkerchiefs to our product mix earlier this year for precisely this reason.

Focusing Our SEO Efforts

Once you have ecommerce tracking setup, you can immediately start correlating your revenues based on which keywords customers are using to arrive on your online store through organic search. For example, when we found that our conversion rate for the term “ladies handkerchiefs” was on the order of 15-20%, we immediately started focusing our SEO efforts around this particular keyword.

Today, our online store fluctuates between the top 2 spots for this search term and it brings in a good amount of revenue every single month for free. Without keyword analytics, it’s hard to tell which search terms will bring you the most revenues. After all, you only have a finite amount of resources and the only way to succeed is to focus your time and effort on activities which will maximize your profits.

Tracking Marketing Campaigns

The problems that most brick and mortar stores face when launching an ad campaign in a newspaper or magazine for example is that it’s difficult to determine how much in sales and foot traffic were generated as a direct result of the advertisement.

With an online store however, it’s very easy to track all of your online marketing campaigns via click tracking in Google Analytics. For example, whenever we send out a broadcast email to our store email list, we insert a link to our online store within the email that is specifically tagged with our promotion. As a result, whenever someone clicks on that link to shop at our store, we know exactly which marketing campaign resulted in that new customer. Analytics will also tell us exactly how much money we made as a direct result of the email promotion.

Using similar principles, we also know which sources of traffic generate the most revenues for our store and can make the necessary adjustments. This past year, conversions from both Bing and Yahoo have started increasing significantly which indicates that we may want to focus more efforts on these 2 search engines. In addition, traffic from Facebook has eeked into the top 10 this past year as well.

Tracking Visitor Information

One other trend that we’ve been noticing lately via analytics is that more and more people are now shopping on their mobile devices. This month, over 5% of our revenues have resulted from orders placed from a mobile phone. At around the same point last year, this number hovered around 1% or less. Depending on the percentage of mobile traffic to our store, we may want to consider creating a separate design specifically optimized for mobile phones.

Another way we use Analytics is to track where our visitors are coming from. This comes in especially handy when deciding how to allocate our advertising dollars. For example, certain wedding websites charge based on how many regions you wish to display advertisements for your store. Because it’s way too expensive to advertise nationally, we use Google Analytics to tell us which states bring us the most revenues and purchase our ads based on this information. After all, there’s no point in paying for ads if there’s not a lucrative market.

Conclusion

These are just a few ways that we use Google Analytics to improve our store. Just because you run a small shop does not mean that you can’t track customer behavior. Google Analytics is very powerful and completely free so there’s no reason not to use it. What are some ways you use analytics for your business?

Daddy, I don’t want to go swimming anymore!

I didn’t really blame her for saying those words. After all, it was clear that she didn’t have fun and neither did I because she was fighting me the entire time. And even though it was just her first lesson, my wife and I questioned whether she was too young to learn and whether swimming lessons were going to work out for her.

But since we paid for a package of 8 lessons, we kept taking her and with each subsequent lesson, she started fighting us less and less. In the beginning, we had to drag her into the pool but by week 3, she started having fun out there. It all started with her kicking her feet and splashing me with water which made her giggle. Then she started blowing bubbles in the water and getting her face wet.

By week 4, something must have clicked inside of her brain because all of a sudden she started jumping in from the side of the pool. She started going down the water slide. She started dunking herself in the water and propelling herself forward. The rest is history!

Nothing Will Change Unless You Work At It

You can’t start something new and expect to become an expert right away. The problem with human nature is that we tend to stick with what we are already good at and practice what we already know. When my daughter first started swimming, she hated it because it was foreign to her.

The water made her eyes hurt and she kept choking and gagging whenever she forgot to hold her breath. When my wife and I contemplated taking her out of swim class, little did we realize that we both experienced the exact same feelings when we first started our online business.

I still vividly remember the grand opening for our online store. Actually “grand” is the exact opposite word to describe that day. We didn’t make a single sale and we second guessed ourselves the entire time. By the end of week 1 and zero sales, I wondered whether this whole online thing was going to work out for us.

My wife questioned whether she would be able to stay at home with our kids without making major sacrifices. We both thought about closing up shop and calling it a day in order to save face! After all, it was both disheartening and embarrassing to tell our friends that we hadn’t sold a darn thing whenever they asked.

But since it was so cheap to maintain the website and we didn’t have any better business ideas, we stuck with it. And slowly but surely our fortunes started to change. We kept the information mill churning and experimented with different customer acquisition strategies whenever we had free time.

We made subtle tweaks and constantly improved our product selection and our website. Then at around the 6 month mark, something clicked and we started getting both search engine customers as well as large orders from event planners and buyers with large spending budgets.

No One Is Born An Expert

While I would love to say that my wife and I are special and that we simply have an innate talent for business, that would be a big time lie. In fact prior to launching our online store, we had zero experience at running a business or putting up websites. We had no knowledge of web development and we had never started a business before.

As a result, we struggled big time early on. But you know what? Eventually, things sunk in and we started seeing the big picture. Whereas we started out by copying other people’s strategies, we eventually started coming up with some of our own and going with the flow.

The point I want to emphasize is that our success didn’t have so much to do with talent or smarts as it did with actually trying something new and learning from our mistakes.

Not Being Good At Something Is Your Choice

We are all humans and by nature we are programmed to stick with things that we are comfortable doing. We tend to put more effort into our strengths and we “like” doing what we are already good at. But at some point, you have to take a step back and remember how you became good at the things you do.

I absolutely hate it when someone emails and asks me something along the lines of “Steve, I’m comfortable with creating websites and the technical stuff but I’m just not good at marketing and sales. Can I still succeed?”

Well S#$%, if you are not good at marketing and sales then you need to start learning or hire someone to teach or help you out! Just because you aren’t good at something now doesn’t mean you can’t become good at it later. You just have to have the right mindset and keep an open mind to learn.

So what am I trying to say here? Instead of resigning yourself to “not being good” at something, why not give it your best shot and try to learn? If you are willing to put in constant effort for many months or years instead of giving up after a few weeks, you will go far. I guarantee it. If my little 3 year old can go from choking and sinking like a rock in the swimming pool to the doggie paddling toddler she is today, so can you!

Help!! I need help!! Kyle pooped in the tub again!! Come quick!!!

Naturally, my wife stopped her shopping spree and helped me clean things up. Yuck!! By the time she got back to her computer a good 45 minutes had elapsed.

Much to her dismay, when she got back to the computer to resume shopping, her shopping cart was empty!!! All of that hard work and she had lost it all because the online store she was shopping at had timed out and emptied out her cart. I will now attempt to recreate our conversation afterwards.

Wife: S#$%! F#$&! What the hell! I lost everything ! I had so many cute outfits in my cart and it took me forever to find all that stuff.

Me: Yeah that sucks….How much was in your shopping cart?

Wife: I don’t know, 700 maybe?!? I hate this store. Never shopping here again

Me: WHAT!?!?!? 700 dollars?? My entire wardrobe doesn’t cost that much!!!! What the hell!!! Do you think we are made of money?!?!

Wife: Well don’t worry about it. I’m not buying anything from this store anymore. It’ll take forever to find the stuff again

Me: (Feeling a sigh of relief) Oh….darn…..I know how much you liked that stuff (feigning concern). I feel horrible…absolutely terrible…

Wife: Shut up. Just for that, I’m spending more at the next shop

Persistent Shopping Carts

The reality is that many shopping carts behave this way. If you close your browser session or if you wait too long, many online stores will empty the contents of the cart. As a result, if a customer returns after a long hiatus of shopping, they will lose what they’ve added.

In many cases, this can cost you a sale because not everyone shops and makes a purchase in a single sitting. Just as an experiment, I asked a bunch of my friends whether they shop this way. And surprisingly, many of them use an online store like a wishlist. They put what they want in their cart, think about it and then return later. And more often than not, they shut down their browser and let things sit a bit before making a purchase.

In fact, looking at our online store statistics, a good 25 percent of customers visit our store more than once before making a purchase. The best way to deal with these customers is to make sure that whatever they put in their shopping cart stays in their shopping cart until they return and are ready to make a purchase. This is what is called a persistent shopping cart.

Implementing A Persistent Shopping Cart

This feature has been on my list for a very long time but I’ve been dragging my feet because strangely enough, there’s no plugin that does this for my shopping cart. Now this feature is very important for our online store for one main reason, personalization. When people shop at our store, then often put up to 8-10 items in their carts at a time and many of these products involve personalization with a special message.

What also ends up happening is that customers take a long time to shop because they want to think about what they want to write and sometimes they have to confer with their significant other before deciding on a message. Can you imagine how frustrating it would be to lose everything you typed in just because you took an extended break?

So it was a no brainer, I had to spin my own solution. Here are 3 possible solutions that I came up with. I apologize in advance if this is next section is a bit more technical than usual.

Extend The Session Timeout Period

By default, the session length for my server is about 15 minutes long. What this means is that my server will hold the contents of a customer’s cart in system memory for 15 minutes of idle time before emptying everything out. So, a logical solution to this problem would be to simply extend this timeout period.

The problem with this solution is that it greatly increases the memory requirements for your online store. By increasing the timeout period for your shop, you essentially have to hold a customer’s shopping cart information in main memory for much longer periods of time which effectively increases the amount of main memory you need to run your website. This solution is clearly not scalable because main memory is a precious resource.

Not only that, but it also doesn’t solve the problem when a customer shuts down their browser or waits for 2 weeks before returning. Do you really want to keep their shopping cart lying around using up precious compute resources for 2 weeks? Probably not…

Store The Cart Contents In A Cookie

Another solution is to use cookies to store the contents of their cart on their computer. Cookies are little files that websites put on the client’s computer in order to store certain pieces of information so a website can recognize a customer when they return. By placing a cookie with the shopping cart contents on the client computer, you can effectively store their shopping cart for as long as you like!

The problem with this solution is that the cookie size is limited to 4K on most browsers. Therefore, if a customer’s shopping cart is large and exceeds this value, certain products in their shopping cart will be lost.

The Best Solution

The best solution and the way I ultimately decided to solve this problem was to use a combination of cookies and my shopping cart database. Here’s what I came up with.

Whenever a customer enters my store, I place a cookie on their computer that is set to expire whenever I feel like it. This cookie contains a secret id which I use to tag certain products in my database. Whenever a customer places an item in their shopping cart, I also store the product in my database and tag it with this secret id.

This way, I can keep track of everything that the customer is interested in based on this secret id which is stored on their computer in the form of a cookie. If they choose to leave for a long time and come back, I look for the presence of this cookie and restore the contents of their shopping cart based on my database which is present for as long as I want it to be.

The downside to this solution is that if a customer abandons their shopping cart, I will accumulate a lot of junk in my database which needs to be periodically cleaned up. So to solve that problem, I set up a CRON job or automated task to automatically clean up the database every single night and remove items that exceed a certain age threshold.

I’m still in the throes of testing my additions to my store and hope to be live with this new feature by the end of the week. The best part is that by storing your abandoned shopping carts, you can also better observe your customers shopping patterns as well.

The Numbers

• Year over year revenue grew 32%
• Year over year profit grew 37%
• Similar to last year, we had 4 consecutive months with higher revenues than last year’s highest month.
• Our margins grew 2%
• Website traffic increased by about 15%
• Our overall conversion rate went up by 24.6%

The Challenges We’ve Been Facing This Year

Last year, my wife and I didn’t get a chance to improve our business that much because our son was just born and we had to adjust to taking care of 2 young kids along with the business. This year, our little one is much older and much easier to take care of so we’ve been able to focus more time on increasing revenue. I’ll talk about some of the strategies we employed in just a minute.

But I just wanted to take a moment to say that inflation is on its way big time to the United States. Now you might be thinking…Duh! Inflation is already here but I don’t think it’s completely hit us on the head just yet. All of our vendors in China have been raising prices like crazy. In addition, shipping has gotten more expensive as well.

Given that many products in the US are manufactured in China and other parts of Asia, I wouldn’t be surprised if prices increase significantly on most products next year. My wife and I have been debating whether to increase prices on both our products and shipping but have decided to hold things relatively flat for now which has caused a slight hit to our bottom line.

So in order to maintain the growth of our business, we’ve employed a few strategies this year which I’ll describe below.

We Boosted Our SEO

This year was the first year that I’ve been determined to drastically improve our organic search rankings and the results speak for themselves. We are now the #1 search result for 6 of our main keyword terms. We are in the top 3 for at least 7 other keyword phrases and we have 5 others in the top 5. While none of these keyword terms yield a particularly large amount of search traffic on their own, they are extremely targeted keywords and our conversion rates are ridiculous for these terms.

For example, the conversion rate for a few of these keywords is upwards of 15-18% which is unheard of. This just goes to demonstrate the power of small niche markets. You can still make a decent amount of money if you can dominate a relatively small niche even if the traffic numbers aren’t that high.

The increase in targeted search traffic helped us offset the rising product costs and labor costs in our industry. In addition, some of the keywords that we ranked for led to increased conversions for our highest margin products.

We Became The Dominant Player In Our Niche

The other goal that my wife and I wanted to attain this year was to completely dominate our niche. Today, we are the largest supplier of wedding handkerchiefs on the Internet. As far as I know, no one carries the same variety that we do. This past year, we increased the number of products that we offered by over 30%. Since we carry everything in stock and do our own embroidery in house, we can offer extremely fast turnaround times on everything we sell.

Fast turnaround times are very attractive to our customers because most brides wait until the last minute to buy their wedding favors. We can offer very predictable shipping and order fulfillment times and guarantee delivery in many cases. Therefore, it’s worth it to a customer to buy from us because they know they will get their goods on time. I strongly believe that our conversion rates have improved because of this fact.

We Sold More Of Our Higher Margin Goods

Besides focusing our SEO efforts on more profitable items, we also started framing the prices of our bestselling products to push our higher margin goods. Framing is when you sandwich the main product you want to sell between two other products that are both priced above and below this item. The tendency of most shoppers is to buy a product that is priced somewhere in the middle. For example, they won’t buy the cheapest item because they don’t want to be considered cheap. And they won’t buy the most expensive item because it costs too much.

So by sandwiching your bestselling and highest margin items between two other products that are priced above and below, you can raise prices and not have a negative effect on sales. For example if I offer one hankie at 5 dollars and another similar one at 7 dollars, the customer will most likely buy the cheaper one. But if I sell a hankie at 5 dollars, another at 10 dollars and another at 20 dollars, the 10 dollar hankie instantly becomes more attractive.

Believe me, these psychological mind games actually work. Our overall margins increased the first half of the year despite increased product costs because we were able to sell more of our higher margin goods without overtly raising prices across the board.

Other Highlights

The other good thing that happened to us the first part of the year was that we were featured in Martha Stewart Weddings magazine! Not only that, but being featured in the magazine directly led to our hankies being used in a very high profile celebrity wedding. I don’t have permission yet to disclose who just yet but I’ll let you know when I do.

In any case, if you still have any doubts about the money making potential of niche markets, our store is the perfect example of how you can sell a very narrow range of products and still be successful. Here’s to another great year!

A Mad Scramble

Several months back, an editor for Martha Stewart contacted us on a Friday afternoon asking if we could send some personalized hankies to their offices for a photo shoot the following Tuesday morning!

It was extremely short notice (the package had to arrive on Monday), but we managed to stitch out their request right then and there(something that would have been impossible to do if we didn’t do our own embroidery in house) and shipped out the hankies that afternoon via Fed Ex Standard Overnight.

While we weren’t guaranteed to be included in the magazine, we went above and beyond by including a few extra items as well. And as luck would have it, they decided to include one of our pieces for the magazine under Darcy’s picks.

Every Business Needs Some Luck

After publishing my article on Starting Your Own Business: How To Improve Your Luck and writing one of my most recent pieces on 3 Ways Our Business Improved By Doing Nothing – Sometimes You Just Have To Stick Around And Good Things Will Happen, I must say that I feel truly blessed.

While being contacted by the press and being featured in any magazine requires some amount of luck and fortuitous timing, there have been a few things that we’ve been doing lately to help improve our chances.

We’ve Been Improving Our SEO

Every single quarter, our online store continues to rise in the search engine rankings thanks to our SEO efforts. Chances are, if you can make the front page of search for your targeted keywords, you have a fighting chance of getting discovered by the magazines.

The editorial staff at the major retail and event magazines often comb through the search engines and various blogs looking for items to feature in their next issue. And if they can find you and you have a good looking store with interesting products, you have a decent chance of getting featured. So be sure to put yourself out there not only in the search engines but in blogs and social media outlets as well.

You can also improve your chances by using a free service called HARO to get in touch with reporters directly. Furthermore, you can get the word out about your store by writing guest posts on popular blogs in your niche.

We Continue To Excel In Customer Service

What was also cool about being included in Martha Stewart Weddings magazine was that the editor contacted us by phone to let us know that one of Martha’s close friends was thinking about making a purchase from our store. And he called us directly so that we would specifically look out for this person and provide her with special care and royal treatment.

The truth is that we give all of our customers special care so there was nothing that needed to be said. I sincerely believe that treating our customers with the utmost care has allowed us to grow even faster via word of mouth. Now why would one of Martha’s friends want to buy from us? Perhaps she read our testimonials or heard good things about us through the grapevine. Perhaps, she enjoyed our section on do it yourself wedding arts and crafts. These days, everybody sells similar items online. The store that a customer will ultimately buy from is a store that stands out from the rest.

Bottom line, my wife and I will continue to run our little online shop with the same great customer service and attractive product offerings knowing that there will be more press opportunities to come.